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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 122 (Nov 6, 2022) — Praising Slowness, Drifting Performance, Expanding Awareness, & More
Sloww Sunday shares creations from Sloww and curations of fascinating finds to 10,000+ students of life. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding the email version of this newsletter to others.
🌎 Lighter Living
The Go-To Book on Slow Living
The book In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honoré is still my favorite book on slow living (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary). Honoré delivers a good mix of personal storytelling, primary and secondary research, and insights on the slow movement. Don’t miss his TED Talk if you haven’t seen it yet.
“Sometimes it takes a wake-up call to alert us to the fact that we’re hurrying through our lives, instead of actually living them; that we’re living the fast life, instead of the good life.” — Carl Honoré
Explore more: How do I design a lighter life (Sloww Stage 1)?
🧭 Higher Purpose
How to Make Money as a Byproduct of Your Purpose
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that making money can be an optional byproduct of finding purpose. I recently completed three Visualize Value courses by Jack Butcher (Twitter thread | 🔒Premium Summary). The courses helped me rethink how Sloww visually shows up in the world. You can see the new visual approach I’m trying on Sloww’s Instagram. Guess who Jack Butcher mentions most often throughout his courses? Naval Ravikant. Well, you’re in luck! I’ve got everything you need to know about Naval (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis).
“(Visualize Value courses are) the field manual for earning a living in the new economy.” — Jack Butcher
Get the eBook: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook)
Explore more: How do I find higher purpose (Sloww Stage 2)?
🧠 Mental Wealth
Drift to Low Performance
This concept has been top of mind ever since I read Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows (Book Summary). You can also read more about this concept on Meadows’ website.
The trap: “Allowing performance standards to be influenced by past performance, especially if there is a negative bias in perceiving past performance, sets up a reinforcing feedback loop of eroding goals that sets a system drifting toward low performance.”
The way out: “Keep performance standards absolute. Even better, let standards be enhanced by the best actual performances instead of being discouraged by the worst. Use the same structure to set up a drift toward high performance!”
“People summon the energy to solve a problem when they sense a gap between their goal and their present state. In a drift to low performance that gap closes, not because performance improves, but because the goal is allowed to slip. Standards erode. The kind of performance that used to cause consternation begins to be defined as normal. Lower expectations, no discrepancy between goal and actuality, no action. Everyone goes to sleep. Drift to low performance feeds upon itself. As everyone gets used to mediocrity it’s easy for standards to slip still further — which lowers expectations and allows even worse performance.” — Donella Meadows
Build mental wealth: Mini Mind: 365 Daily Emails of Bite-Size Brain Food
Explore more: How do I master the mind (Sloww Stage 3)?
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
🆕 Book Summary: On Having No Head by Douglas Harding
I just read the short book On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious by Douglas Harding. If you’re interested in another angle on nonduality, check it out. Harding passed away in 2007 at the age of 97, but Richard Lang is continuing the “headless” work. Lang created a mini-documentary called The Man with No Head, recorded a short video intro to The Headless Way, and has appeared on podcasts with Sam Harris and Chris Williamson.
”The best day of my life – my rebirthday, so to speak – was when I found I had no head … It was when I was thirty-three that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent inquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I?” — Douglas Harding
Explore more: How do I embody wisdom (Sloww Stage 4)?
🤯 Mind Expanding
Alexander Technique for Expanding Awareness
This is quite literally the definition of “mind expanding.” I just completed the course Fundamentals of Alexander Technique by Michael Ashcroft (🔒Premium summary). This course covers: attention vs awareness, collapsed awareness vs expanded awareness, caring vs intending, inhibition, non-doing, and more.
Michael doesn’t often discount his course, but he was kind enough to offer Sloww readers a 10% discount ($25 off) with the code SLOWW10 when you join here (affiliate link).
“This is the first and only fully asynchronous, online beginners’ course on Alexander Technique … Consider it an introduction to some aspects of your psychophysical system (your ‘bodymind’) that you may not have noticed before, or not noticed were actually in your conscious control. And then, once you’ve noticed these things, to explore the utility of getting better at the kind of conscious control that I describe.” — Michael Ashcroft
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Go with the Sloww,
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur
